Laura Zambrano-Vazquez

• PhD
• Managing Director at Center of Excellence for Research on Returning War Veterans

Undergraduate mentoring and research internships promote entry into graduate training, academic success, research productivity, and greater career satisfaction. Most pathway programs to enhance representation within academia and health care intervene at the graduate level, leaving a critical gap in undergraduate training. The Veterans Health Admini...

A promising approach to enhancing trauma-focused treatment is moral elevation—feeling inspired by witnessing a virtuous act. This study explored potential links between eliciting elevation and relevant outcomes in a series of case examples. Veterans with probable posttraumatic stress disorder completed experimental tasks including a written trauma...

Background and Objectives: A promising approach to incorporate positive psychology principles into trauma-focused treatment is moral elevation—feeling inspired by witnessing a virtuous act. This study aimed to explore potential links between inducing moral elevation and relevant outcomes in a series of case examples.Methods: Veterans with probable...

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance use disorders (SUD) are highly comorbid among the veteran population. Impulsivity, particularly negative and positive urgency, are prevalent within this dual-diagnosis population and associated with negative outcomes. One possible correlate of negative/positive urgency is intolerance of uncertainty...

Objective Traumatic brain injuries (TBI) are commonly characterized by neural changes that impair physical, behavioral, and cognitive functioning across diverse ages and demographics. Cognitive complaints frequently include memory difficulties, with deficits in episodic memory greatly impairing daily functioning and future planning. Although variou...

Objective: Alcohol use and alcohol use disorders (AUDs) are an increasing concern among veterans, particularly those from recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The study of biomarkers in alcohol use and AUD has moved to enhancing the understanding of the development and maintenance of AUDs, as well as investigating its association with clinical...

Background: Intrusive thoughts are characteristic of psychological disorders; attempts to cope can become maladaptive perpetuating the problem (e.g., thought suppression), while others can provide long-term symptoms relief (e.g., acceptance). Although emerging research begins to explore the neural correlates of these strategies in healthy populatio...

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) disrupts brain communication and increases risk for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, mechanisms by which TBI-related disruption of brain communication confers PTSD risk have not been successfully elucidated in humans. This may be in part because fMRI, the most common technique for measuring brain function,...

The co-occurrence of posttraumatic stress disorder and substance use disorder (PTSD-SUD) can pose significant problems for rural pregnant and postpartum women (PPW) and the well-being of their children. Although effective treatments exist, PPW experience limitations in their ability to access and engage in treatment that may be compounded by variou...

Objectives: Comorbidity in diagnosis raises critical challenges for psychological assessment and treatment. The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) Project, launched by the National Institutes of Mental Health, proposes domains of functioning as a way to conceptualize the overlap between comorbid conditions and inform treatment selection. However, fur...

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance use disorders (SUDs) are commonly co-occurring disorders associated with more adverse consequences than PTSD alone. Prolonged exposure therapy (PE) is one of the most efficacious treatments for PTSD. However, among individuals with PTSD-SUD, 35–62% of individuals drop out of trauma-focused exposure...

Some authors have argued that worry cues lateralization of frontal brain activity leftward, whereas other varieties of avoidance motivation cue lateralization of frontal brain activity rightward. By comparison, more right-than-left parietal activity correlates with anxious arousal. The purpose of the present report was to test two models of brain l...

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by intrusive thoughts (i.e. obsessions) and future-oriented worrisome cognitions that are associated with behavioral ritualistic compensations (i.e. compulsions) and anxious arousal. Research has found an enhanced error-related negativity (ERN) among those with OCD in choice response tasks such a...

We present evidence that a multitude of mid-frontal event-related potential (ERP) components partially reflect a common theta band oscillatory process. Specifically, mid-frontal ERP components in the N2 time range and error-related negativity time range are parsimoniously characterized as reflections of theta band activities. Forty participants com...